Christmas Eve, 2015

As Catholic Christians, we Episcopalians are countercultural.  In the early days of colonial America, the Puritans outlawed the observance of Christmas with very severe penalties.  Now the protestant pendulim has swung to the other extreme. These days our neighbours, who have been celebrating Christmas since well before Hallowe'en, will be throwing out their trees tomorrow morning, In the meantime, we have been observing the lovely, anticipatory season of Advent for four weeks.  Now tonight we begin to celebrate twelve days of Christmas.  What were they thinking? We have eleven extra days to party!,

And what are we partying about?  We celebrate one gift:  the Incarnation, in which God got "under our skin," lived human life in the person of Jesus, and, likewise, in Jesus, taught us what a life fully attuned to God looks like.   At the point in the Mass when the priest pours wine into the chalice and then tops the wine off with a little water, the priest says silently, "By the mingling of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity."  That's it: he became as we are so we might become as he is.

Tonight;s readings tell the story of this marvellous conjunction.  I suspect if you or I had written the script, the Divine Son would have appeared as a prince, born in a palace in some prominent city like Rome or Athens, surrounding by courtiers and all the rich and the famous of his age.  But when God writes the script, we find the Son of God born in a cave to a refugee family from a backwater town, the child resting in an animal feeding trough, and being visited by smelly, sinful shepherds. What a difference between our reality and the world in which God always values the outcast, the poor, and the oppressed.  "He has pulled down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.  He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty handed." (Lk 1:52,53).  Thus Our Lady describes God's Kingdom.

As important and central to this night's message as is the Incarnation, it is all for nought if God does not become incarnate in us.   As Mother Barbara Brown Taylor wrote of this season, "God is in the midst of it, after all, still hunting new flesh in which to be born."

Happy Christmas!